First the artist had to imagine something that had not been imagined before. Like a Stone Age man standing on a hill, watching birds in the sky, and dreaming of himself flying. That was simple, direct imagination at work. Then from this chunk of raw imagination must come something that was unique to art: a conceptualization; which was something more specific than just a general imaginative wish.
It must throw up some fanciful means by which the imagination could become reality; as Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of an ornithopter was an attempt to conceptualize a human flying machine. Then that conceptualization had to be refined by a number of generations and experiments, until finally it became a clear visualization of whatever was the ultimate conclusion.
It suddenly occurred to Jim that those three steps—imagination, conceptualization, and the envisioning of a working solution—celebrated the very faculties that medieval life taught people like Brian and Giles to avoid. Medieval people were not supposed to think of altering the environment around them, but rather accept and put up with it. The better they were at simply accepting and reacting to things as they saw them, the more they tended to be a success within the structure and terms of their own society.
No wonder the road of learning down which Carolinus had pointed Jim was called Magic.
And no wonder, being a product of civilization in which much of this magic had become scientific and technological reality, he was in a better position to travel down it than someone like his two friends, with all their courage and other good points.
He woke out of his thoughts to realize that he was getting very close to the source of the feeling that had drawn him in this direction. In fact that feeling now pointed him only a little ways ahead and back down to the surface of the earth.
He looked in that direction now; and saw, perhaps a mile or two ahead, a scattering of trees that could hardly be called a wood, but which enclosed an open space at its center in which sat what looked like a castle.
Jim adjusted his vision to the best of a dragon's telescopic eyesight; and was barely able to make out that the castle, while real enough, was to a large extent in ruins. The moat around it was empty; and while most of its roof seemed intact from this distance, in some cases the outer wall had fallen down. He put himself into a glide toward it.
The day had fulfilled its promise by becoming hot. As he neared the ground, what air was moving tended to die away, so that he planed downward merely on the spread of his wings and the speed of his descent. He pulled up with a jerk just above the earth; and landed with a thump just outside the dry moat of the ruined castle. A drawbridge, in surprisingly good repair, spanned the moat and pointed the way to a large pair of double doors, one of which stood a little ajar, revealing a narrow, vertical gap of darkness beyond.
Here at ground level the air was absolutely still, so that the day seemed breathless. In spite of the bright sun beaming down on everything, and the small blades of grass trying here and there to sprout through the bare earth, the stillness and the ruined aspect of the castle had an ominous feel to it. But it was from inside the building that the dragon feeling was reaching out to Jim.
He stumped ahead—a dragon walking on his hind legs could hardly do anything else but stump when he walked—and the sound of his feet, with all his weight upon them, boomed heavily in the utter silence about him. He reached the two tall doors and knocked. They were large enough to reach half again his own height above his head. Either one of them, opened, could let him pass through.
He thumped with his knuckles on the door. And waited.
After a bit he knocked again. But there was still no response.
He pushed the door all the way open and stepped into a space that turned out not to be entirely lightless, after all. It was a dimly-lit, large hall illuminated only by a couple of slitlike windows, one beyond the hinge side of each of the doors through which he had entered.
"Anybody home?" he shouted—although he knew very well that somebody was home. He could feel him, her, or them there. After a moment, still with no response, he grew tired of waiting.
"I know you're here," he called. "You didn't expect to fool another dragon did you? Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
In spite of himself the last words ended up in the singsong in which he had spoken them in his childhood.
There was a second more of silence and then a long length of white cloth—it must be forty or more feet, Jim thought, to reach up to wherever it was attached, out of sight in the darkness at the top of the hall—fell down before him and began to ripple as it was waved back and forth.
"Go away!" boomed an enormous, hollow dragon voice. "If you value your life, go awaaay!"
The crude attempt of exaggerated voice and the rippling white cloth, which plainly was being made to move from above, reminded Jim of his Halloween-party days as a child. He almost laughed.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Jim shouted back. "I'm not going away!" He had upped his own voice a notch. It did not match what he was hearing; but it came fairly close.
"You're an English dragon!" boomed the voice. "You've got no business here! Go awaaay!"
"I'm an English dragon all right," Jim roared back, "but I’ve got a passport to turn over to a responsible French dragon!"
There was a second's pause. Then the voice he was listening to spoke again, on another note.
"Passport?" the voice said. "Stay there."
The white cloth was whisked upward, and there was a scrabbling sound, at first overhead, then moving toward the back of the hall, and at last descending toward Jim. He waited. After a moment, there was the sound of heavy dragon footsteps approaching; and there appeared not one, but two dragons, one noticeably smaller than the other. They both looked underfed. The larger dragon must once have been as big as Jim, but he was now showing signs of age and his body had shrunken on his great bones.
"What's your name?" he demanded of Jim in a rusty, deep, bass voice.
No wonder, thought Jim, that the other had sounded hollow shouting down from the ceiling of the hall. He was himself hollow; a bag of bones was not an unfair way to describe him. He must be older than Smrgol had been. This, however, was no such kindly old dragon as Smrgol. He looked old and wicked.
"James," said Jim shortly.
The bigger dragon looked at the lesser.
"Crazy English name," he said, to his companion. The smaller dragon nodded her wickedly narrow head—for Jim could now see that she was a female—in agreement. It struck Jim suddenly that he had run across something that was an oddity among the English dragons. A mated pair who lived apart from any dragon community.
But the larger dragon's eyes were gleaming avariciously. "Where's the passport?" he demanded.
Jim felt a sense of caution.
"Outside," he answered. "I'll get it. But you two stay here while I do."
The larger dragon grunted unwillingly. But neither stirred when Jim turned about, went out the door again, crossed the moat, and ended up on the bare earth and sparse grass before the castle. He turned his back on the doorway.
He was trying desperately to remember just what Carolinus's directions had been for his getting the passport up out of him and back to proper size again. If only Carolinus hadn't complicated the matter by telling him in the same breath the routine for getting up the Encyclopedie Necromantick.
His mind scrambled and found it.
To produce the bag of passport jewels, Jim was to cough twice, sneeze once, and then cough once again. He had not stopped to think that he might be in his dragon body at the time he did this. Of course, he could always change back to his human form; but after seeing the two inside he held a strong inclination not to give up, even temporarily, the protection of his strong, young, dragon body.
Well, there was nothing to be lost by trying.
He attempted to cough. To his joy, dragons could cough. He coughed very well, in fact. Having done it once, he did it again. What was next? Oh yes, the sneeze.
Howev
er, it seemed a legitimate sneeze was not easy to produce on demand. Jim began to feel uncomfortable. In spite of the fact that the other two dragons had not moved as he went out the door, he was now almost certain he could feel their eyes on him through the door that still stood ajar—in fact, Jim had round that it would not close any further.
"Atchoo!" he said hopefully.
Nothing happened. No sack of jewels began to bulk inside him. Jim began to feel a bit frantic. What if Carolinus, absentminded as he seemed to be from time to time, had simply not taken into account the fact that dragons were incapable of sneezing? In fact, who had ever heard of a dragon sneezing?
In desperation, Jim reached out, plucked one of the sparse blades of grass and attempted to tickle the inside of one of his nostrils with it. But he could scarcely feel the grass within the capacious nostril. That was no answer.
Perhaps if he had something a little longer and firmer… His eyes searched the ground and finally spotted, about fifteen feet away, a dry and ancient twig, which had the virtue of being at least twelve inches long.
He walked over to it, trying to do so as casually as he could while still keeping his back to the open slit in the doorway. Having reached it, he looked around at the landscape and up at the sky before—as casually as possible—reaching down to scoop up the stick. Keeping it hidden by the bulk of his body he tried tickling the inside of his nostril with it.
This, his nostril could feel. But it produced no sneeze. The dry stick, that had several corners of once-budded joints, scratched at the inside of his nostril and brought momentary tears to his eyes.
But still, it did not make him sneeze.
Well, a dragon's muzzle was long, and therefore his nostrils were long. There was still plenty of nostril to go. He pushed the stick as for up as he could. There was a moment of sharp pain, then a horrendous tickle. Then an enormous sneeze that blew the twig somewhere out of sight. Hastily, Jim coughed.
When he at last blinked his watering eyes clear, he saw the sack of jewels that was the passport standing on the ground in front of him. He snatched it up, turned, and went back into the castle.
By the time he came through the front door again, carrying the sack, the other two were back where he had left them. But their eyes fastened almost as if hypnotized on the sack.
"Look!" cried the smaller dragon.
Her voice was as rusty as that of her companion. They also looked to be about the same age. It was a much higher voice, however, and it did not have the tremendous booming quality of the other.
"Those Phoenicians," rumbled the larger dragon, "coming up to the Isle of Scilly and other places about nineteen hundred years ago. And those English dragons getting all the best of it."
He looked directly at Jim.
"So," he said, "hand over the passport!"
"Hold on a minute," retorted Jim, still holding the sack to him. "What are your names?"
"Sorpil," grumbled the big dragon after a moment's pause. "I'm Sorpil. This is my wife, Maigra. Now give me that passport."
"Give us the passport!" snapped Maigra.
"Not just yet," said Jim. He was suddenly grateful that on their flight back from the Cliffside dragon community to Malencontri, Secoh had briefed him on both the obligations he would have toward his French hosts, and the corresponding obligations they were supposed to have toward him. "Do you assure me that the two of you are in good standing with your fellow dragons and that you are qualified to accept this passport on their behalf?"
"Of course, of course," grumbled Sorpil. "Now hand it over."
"Don't be in such a sulfurous hurry!" said Jim, borrowing one of Gorbash's granduncle's favorite dragonish swearwords. "We'll go through the whole ritual of transfer, if you don't mind. You're agreeable to that, aren't you?"
The two looked sour. But Jim knew they had no choice. If they wanted to get their claws on his passport, it was incumbent upon them not only to give Jim the right answers, but even to feed and house him, in a supposedly friendly gesture, overnight. It was a way of sealing the bargain.
"Now, you've assured me you're in good standing with your fellow dragons," Jim said. "You understand that I'll be checking this statement of yours with the next French dragon I meet?"
"Yes, yes!" shrilled Maigra—or at least her voice was shrill by dragon standards. She was almost jumping up and down in excitement, with her eyes on the passport.
"I do," growled Sorpil. "We both do."
"Yes, yes!" said Maigra again.
"On my part," said Jim, now well into the ritual, "I give my word not to do anything that will cause difficulties or trouble for the dragons of France, and if accidentally I should do so, I will undertake to correct or dispose of this difficulty or problem, before I leave France and without imposing upon the dragons of France for help. You have heard and noted this declaration from me?"
"We have," said Sorpil disgustedly.
"On the other hand," said Jim, "in case I should run into mistreatment in France, as a result of attitudes or actions by French georges, or others native to this land, I can if need be call for help upon all French dragons; and will be given the courtesy of that help."
This time there was no immediate answer. Sorpil and Maigra looked at each other, then looked at the passport, then looked at each other again. The moments stretched out without a response from them.
"Well?" demanded Jim, at last. "Is the answer yes, or not? Perhaps I should just go back to England."
"No, no," said Maigra quickly.
"Now you don't be in such a sulfurous hurry," muttered Sorpil. He turned to Maigra. "Do you think the others—"
"We'd have to pay, of course—" said Maigra.
They looked at each other for a long moment, then back at the passport, then at each other again. Finally their eyes came once more to Jim's.
"We accept," said Sorpil, heavily, "we agree."
"Fine," said Jim.
"Just what are you planning to do here?" asked Sorpil.
Jim, who had been about to hand over the passport, held on to it instead.
"I don't have to tell you that," he said.
Sorpil swore, in a manner rather more georgelike than dragonlike.
"Just thought we might be able to be of some use to you, that's all," he said disgruntledly.
"Well, thanks anyway," said Jim, "but what I do here is my own affair; and I expect not to be followed or spied upon by any local French dragons. Is that understood?"
"Yes!" shrilled Maigra.
"Then I hereby give you this passport to hold until I leave," said Jim. "At which time, providing I have not violated the terms of our accord, you will return it to me exactly as it is. You understand that it is merely security for my good conduct while I am here."
"Of course!" said Sorpil. "Now, hand it over and we'll take you in and feed you. Isn't that what you want?"
"As I understood, it was customary," said Jim, passing over the passport.
"Oh, it is," said Maigra, in no particularly inviting voice. "Come along, then."
Jim followed them; and they went back through the dim hall, into the even dimmer recesses of the rest of the castle.
Chapter Eighteen
Over dinner Sorpil and Maigra made a belated attempt to play the genial hosts. It was not largely successful because, as Jim discovered while the meal, the wine-drinking, and the talk went on, the two were about as sour-mouthed toward each other as they were toward anybody and anything else—except their guest of the moment.
Small, cutting remarks aimed at each other had a tendency to creep into their conversations, even while they were trying to pour conversational syrup over the social situation. In addition, they were obviously both very interested in enticing or tricking Jim into revealing why he was in France and what he intended to do here.
However, they were exceedingly clumsy at it, probably as a result of not having had much practice. In fact, Jim suspected them of having gone without any kind of contact, even with other dragons
, for a very long time.
Maigra, the faster talker, had a tendency to slip into the middle of sentences being slowly enunciated by her husband. Sorpil would occasionally take time off to rebuke her for this. The result was that their efforts to worm Jim's secrets from him were sadly hampered because they could not act as a team; in fact, they had rather a tendency to act at cross purposes.
Meanwhile, Jim learned something about them.
"This château?" Sorpil responded in answer to one of Jim's questions. "It belonged to georges, originally, of course. I took it from them, about a hundred and twenty years ago. I'd had about enough of them sitting and milking the peasants dry, leaving nothing for a couple of dragons to live on, but a few scrawny goats. So—"
"Actually, by the time Sorpil made his attack on the georges in the château," Maigra cut in, "they'd already taken a rather bad beating from a group of your English georges. That's why the château's so damaged—"
"I was speaking, Maigra, if you don't mind," came in Sorpil, heavily. "As I was saying, the minute these georges Maigra mentioned had left, I waited for a time when everybody in the château should be asleep; and entering through the part of the château that had been broken into, I, alone—"
"I was with him," said Maigra, "but he doesn't count that, naturally. The fact of the matter is—"
"It was at night," said Sorpil, "and most of their little lights—what do they call those things, now—"
"Candles!" snapped Maigra.
"Their candles were all out," said Sorpil, "and of course they're practically blind unless they've got some light to see by."
Jim and the other two were dining in a hall almost as large as the one he had entered through the front door, lit only by the moonlight coming through some tall windows along one side of the room. This, of course, did not bother Jim in his dragon body—dragons being quite comfortable in near-darkness, or even in complete darkness; although it was a little more convenient to get around with a small amount of light. The amount of moonlight coming in the windows was ideal.
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